Silo Greenway melds together a celebration of Buffalo’s vibrant park system and previous industrial history, to provide an ambitious vision of a future urban greenway park that’s ecologically sensitive, developmentally stimulating and experientially exciting. Through the imaginative (re)use of the iconic industrial silo form – held fast in the aging monuments of concrete and steel like the Concrete Central and Cargill grain elevators both visible from atop the Greenway – this proposal aims to instigate many new experiences and amenities benefitting local residents, as well as the ever-growing sector of Downtown tourists and eventgoers. The prominent cylindrical form of the industrial grain silo is reconsidered at numerous scales, materials and configurations, all capable of accommodating new functions like a skate park, event pavilion, pop-up market, skating rink, stage and observation eco-towers. The cylinder is playfully reconsidered, laid down on its side as a bridge, embedded into the ground to sculpt the land, and aggregated into clusters, while the detached towers towards the east entice people to explore further, stimulating their bodies through activity and curiosity of mind. The cylinder also generates smaller scale elements like shaded benches and screening privacy walls strategically placed to buffer the public space of the Greenway from adjacent residences.

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Across the length of the Greenway the materiality of the cylinder elements gradually transforms from more solid concrete, to more ethereal expanded metal mesh. This material transformation mimics and even amplifies the qualities of the existing site conditions. It provides more durable opportunities for events and public congregation closer to Downtown and towards Red Jacket Park it cultivates opportunities for vegetation to grow and birds to nest within the metal mesh towers, integrating and even bolstering the existing ecologies.

The transformation of the cylinder forms across the Greenway conceptually reflects the history of Buffalo, marked on one end by its resolutely industrial past and the other by the possibility of a more diverse ecologically active future. Even if the technology of the grain silo is no longer utilized as it once was in Buffalo, its form may still prove effective for creating interest, activity, wonder and delight.

 

 

Date: 2019.02

 

Location: Buffalo, New York

 

Project Director: Martin Miller, Mo Zheng,

Ryan Ludwig 

 

Design Team: Christopher Beckett, Luke Theodorius E. D, Yasser Hafizs, Annie Liue

 

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